Living, so the dead don't have to.
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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Revisiting Eve

“I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.”~ Ouida

The notion of Eve has stuck in my mind for a long while. Through exploring the thoughts running through my head I seem to be heading in one certain directionAnyway...So Eve... Let me go back a bit and put out some of my thoughts on the parable itself.I think that this parable has its basis in the change, for humans, from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to that of an agrarian society. this change is probably one of the most dramatic changes that occurred in human history (now mind you, I say this fully believing in evolution and having faith in a divine). Some regard it as our biggest mistake... and I tend towards agreeing with that. Not that I would give it all up and head out and join the Hadza (ironically this article is part of what helped form some of the burgeoning conclusions I appear to be coming to. I suppose, since I link to an article that helped in some transformative thought that I need to share what started off the whole thing. It was this article by PZ Meyers. Please, I think he has some of the most interesting links and put some interesting thoughts out there.. I think he worships from the dogma of atheism in a manner similar to an extreme fundamentalist and I am of the thought that both require some mechanism of faith to be present. Anyway, I digress... I am going to brush off the rest of the PZ article because I think it is fueled by much the same thing as tele-evangelists making appeals for money for ones salvation... self-interest.So, Eve. I am not so sure why his article struck me in that one point... but I do think that Eve was always deeply misunderstood. I recall the first time I heard of the story of taking of the so called forbidden fruit and I knew exactly why she had, I think I may have been about 6 or 7 at the time. I always assumed it was be cause she was curious... not in the way one looks in the medicine cabinet when in the restroom of a house they are visiting ... but about everything. how things grow, how things die, how things change, how things are, why things happen, the concept of zero, the concept of 1 (yes, one can argue there was stasis in the garden of Eden, but to me that is just not possible.. and I can get into why I think this if you want but in a nutshell it is just about how I marvel at the world and how magnificently it operates and that a big part of that is how there is change over time, adaptations.. it is just such a magnificent construct that I am often left speechless in its mere contemplation).So Eve, as PZ proposes, as a free thinker is a valid thing to postulate... however, I would argue that if there is a God in the form of a divine being then perhaps Eve was created to do this very thing, to make the leap from one kind of existence to another, that this is change over time, adaptation and evolution in a cacophony of interpretations.As an anthropologist I seek to find the origins to things.. why would this story be the a part of creation story for Abraham based religions. Who was the ancestor that were Adam and Eve and why did they become immortalized.Now, I realize that Adam and Eve could be just one specific couple but I would venture that it was a collection of couples. Or, as I am starting to think, perhaps it was generations upon generations of couples that lived as hunter gatherers. And that Eve is the symbolism of the move from that lifestyle to an agricultural one.